M.I.R.E - Author's Statement

The development of new media has had a significant impact on communication, creating a global multimedia environment. While digital technologies have been widely used in research in the humanities and social sciences, the focus of use has tended to be in the collection of data, the management of large databases, and the manipulation of numerical data sets. In addition, the publication of research outcomes has increasingly used the capacities of search to source research material, and to make material available to audiences through the internet. However there seems to be a blockage to the fuller use of the multimedia capacity of the Web for research and publication (though not in teaching) in the humanities and social sciences.

A number of factors contribute to this blockage. Innovation in multimedia outcomes of research can only flourish under certain conditions - conditions which have been created for the development of teaching materials, but which appear to be limited or missing in relation to research and scholarship. In summary these conditions are:

* institutional and disciplinary cultures of innovation in approaches to research and publication;

* financial support for innovation;

* professional criteria for tenure and promotion that include multimedia publications;

* academic criteria for evaluating quality in multimedia publication through peer review;

* sufficiently skilled and experienced peers to undertake peer review;

* the availability of "industrial" rather than "craft" technologies for the publication of multimedia scholarship;

* the development of team approaches to publishing that incorporate research and creative personnel;

* the nurturing of a new generation of multimedia aware and capable researchers who can create global learning networks of mutual support;

* willingness to take risks by emerging researchers in high status institutions;

* quality control equivalent to that generated by the rationing of access to publication in high status print journals.

These conditions have been deduced from an examination of points of innovation - both successful and unsuccessful - in North America, the UK and Australia. One of the most critical issues has been the identification of research areas that allow both individual scholarship and collaborative research, that are media rich, and which offer inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary opportunities.

This project - tagged "MIRE" for its development of a proposed multimedia interactive research environment - seeks to address many of the implications of the conditions outlined above. Concept.